The Dream and the Tomb

by Robert Payne

  When the terms were arranged to the satisfaction of the emirs, it was agreed that Damietta should be surrendered to the Egyptians and that the Christians should pay 400,000 livres tournois as an indemnity, half to be paid in Damietta, and half when the king reached Acre. The French for their part would receive all their siege engines and all their supplies of salted pork and their ships; the prisoners would be restored to them; and they in turn would surrender the few prisoners in their power. The king asked for Jerusalem in exchange for Damietta, which was held by a small garrison force aided by Genoese and Pisan sailors. Characteristically, the king refused to swear an oath. The Egyptians were incensed, and to punish the king they tortured the patriarch of Jerusalem by tying him to a post and binding his wrists in such a fashion that his hands swelled to the size of his face. The eighty-year-old patriarch faced the ordeal bravely, and at last they untied him and let him go free.

  The torturing of the patriarch in front of the king was idle malice, for the Egyptians knew that the king would not change his mind. They were half in awe of him, and they considered giving him Jerusalem. There were even some who thought that, if he were converted to Islam, he would be a worthy sultan of Egypt. All through those confused negotiations we are aware of the king’s calm decisiveness, his passionate self-abnegation.

  He had cause for self-abnegation, for he knew that the disaster at Man-sourah was due to his own follies, and most especially to his caution, the long weeks and months during which he ordered the army to stay put in Cyprus, in Damietta, and outside the walls of Mansourah. Because of him, perhaps fifty thousand men had died of pestilence or were butchered on the battlefield. A vast treasure had been squandered, and a huge ransom was being paid, equal to the entire yearly revenue of the king of France. The worst was the carnage: the canals swollen with the dead, the fields carpeted with the dying. None of this would have happened if he had been a better soldier. He found consolation in the thought that the dead would be received in heaven by a merciful God, but there were times when he fell into long fits of depression.

  He was wretchedly ill, sometimes he had to be carried about by a servant, and for a while, until someone gave him a rough gown to hide his nakedness, he had no clothes. Later the Egyptians gave him a gown of silk and miniver, so that he could attend the meetings of the armistice commissioners in proper attire.

  Damietta was surrendered to the Egyptians. There was no difficulty in raising half the ransom money, but the king’s brother, Alfonso, Count of Poitou, had to remain at Damietta as surety for the remaining half of the ransom, which was to be paid in Acre. When at last, early in May 1250, the king and his retinue of knights sailed for Acre, he was carried on board the galley on the same mattress he had used in prison. He was still very ill, but the sea air seemed to revive him. Once, while on shipboard, he saw some knights gambling at backgammon; he was so angry that he threw the board into the sea and gave the knights a sermon on the sin of gambling on a Crusade.

  The king, of course, was the greatest gambler of them all. He had gambled with human lives on a prodigious scale, recklessly and imprudently, with little understanding of the enemy or of the geography of the Nile Delta. His monumental ignorance of the enemy and the enemy’s land was fatal to his cause, and in his own way he contributed to the final defeat of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Scorn for his misbegotten endeavors imbues this ironic Arab poem:

  May God reward you for having brought to death the adorers of Jesus the Messiah.

  You came to Egypt with the idea of conquering this kingdom,

  And you believed you would meet here only hautboys and cymbals,

  But instead by your imprudence you have led your men to the gate of death!

  Fifty thousand men, and there is not one of them who is not dead, wounded, or in prison

  God be merciful to you for such an enterprise!

  St. Louis in Acre

  HOW many defeats could the Crusaders withstand? It was as though a curse lay upon them, as though in some mysterious way they found themselves attracted to disaster, like men desperate to destroy themselves. Hattin, La Forbie, and Mansourah were calamities of the first magnitude, and all of them could have been averted with a little common sense or with a fourteen-year-old boy’s knowledge of warfare. The Christian commanders were astonishingly ignorant, inept, and careless; they rarely looked at maps; they underestimated the strength of their enemies; while the knights were well cared for, they paid little attention to the provisioning of the foot soldiers; they allowed the enemy to choose the battleground. Into these death traps the Crusaders fell in the thousands.

  Nor was it difficult to discover why they acted so precipitately, so unheedingly. They despised the Saracens, knew very little about them, believed that God was on their side, and were quite certain that their civilization was far superior to the civilization of the Arabs at a time when it would have been clear to a visitor from another planet that Arab civilization was in the ascendant. In the sciences, philosophy, theology, medicine, and poetry, the Arabs were far more advanced than the West. They knew where they were going; they had a social system which, in spite of its authoritarian character, was remarkably responsive to the wishes of the people. Their society was stable, while Western society was in flux, the feudal state giving place to the nation state, the cities dissolving into communes, the state itself dissolving into its commercial allegiances. The West was changing at a dizzy pace, but the East was changeless.

  The Crusaders were, by their very nature, the inhabitants of a theocracy. If the theocracy sometimes took the form of the government of Acre, part princedom, part commune, part colony, this was because its ultimate ruler was the pope, who understood very little about its inner mechanisms; and even if they had been explained to him, he would not have understood them. Acre was in a state of perpetual civil war, with the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians at each other’s throats. Even when they were not fighting one another with weapons, they hated each other so vigorously that they were rarely capable of coming to any agreement.

  When King Louis IX arrived in Acre, the people, having seen his flag flying from the mast, came down to the sea in procession to meet him. The clergy led the procession, the church bells pealed, and in the churches candles were lit for his safe arrival. Once more there was a king in Acre, and once more the business of the Crusades could go on.

  At first, he seems to have had no intention of remaining in the Holy Land for any length of time. His mother was beseeching him to return to France; France and England were at loggerheads and war seemed imminent; people in France were protesting against the tithes spent on the upkeep of the Holy Land; and the queen was even sterner than her son, the king. He was needed in Paris, but he was also, as he saw clearly, needed in Acre. “If I depart,” he told his councillors, “this land is lost, for all those who are in Acre will follow after me, none daring to remain when the people are so few.” This was not a boast; it was the truth. By kingly power he could hold what was left of the kingdom together; without that power, the kingdom was almost certainly doomed.

  He allowed his councillors eight days in which to come to their conclusions. When they met the king in council, nearly all of them agreed that he should return to France because the people were so few that it would be necessary to recruit another army in order to hold the Holy Land, even the little cliff-edge of it that remained. Only a few councillors, including the chronicler John of Joinville, thought he had a bounden duty to remain. There was another meeting eight days later, and the king announced that he was staying indefinitely, as long as he could be useful.

  He felt responsible for the men who were still in captivity in Egypt; he felt a greater responsibility for Jerusalem, which he hoped, in spite of the defeat at Mansourah, to reclaim for the Christians; and he felt that perhaps his greatest responsibility was to strengthen those fortresses that still remained in Christian hands, so that the kingdom could endure. Repairing and building fortresses became his constant preocc
upation: and so at Acre, Jaffa, Caesarea, and Sidon he could be seen mingling with the masons, carrying stones and baskets full of quicklime. The Saracens were making frequent forays near Acre, and he took part in repulsing them.

  He was war leader, chief justice, prince, and gravedigger. He regarded himself as the only person allowed to make treaties, and when the master of the Temple made an agreement with the sultan of Damascus about some land on the borders of the kingdom, he was incensed because he had not been consulted. The sultan’s ambassador was invited to the king’s tent, the treaty was given back to him unsigned, and he was then invited to watch a long procession of Templars, headed by the master, all of them barefoot, their heads bowed in penitence. Thereafter, the sultan of Damascus knew who signed treaties.

  While he was in Acre the king entertained envoys from the Old Man of the Mountain, who still maintained the stronghold at Masyaf, and still sent out Assassins to murder kings. Indeed the murdering of kings was one of his major occupations. He had a long Danish ax, the haft silver-plated with many knives affixed to it, which would, on ceremonial occasions, be carried before him by a herald, and everyone would know that those were the knives the Assassins had used when they struck down kings.

  Louis was prepared to receive envoys from Masyaf: such receptions were dangerous, but it was also dangerous not to receive them. There were three members of the embassy. First, there was the ambassador, a man of high position. Behind him was a young man who held in one hand a knife that consisted of three knives, two of the blades being inserted in the handles of other knives. This three-bladed knife was an offering signifying defiance in the event that the king refused to accede to their demands. A third youth carried a winding sheet of coarse linen cloth wrapped around his arm; this, too, was intended as a present for the king if he disobeyed the orders of the Old Man of the Mountain. The Assassins went to some pains to cultivate terror.

  The king had cautiously arranged that the ambassador should sit immediately below his throne, with the youths sitting behind the ambassador. He knew the reputation of the Old Man of the Mountain and was taking no chances.

  The ambassador began by asking the king whether he knew the Old Man of the Mountain. The king replied that he had heard of him but had never met him.

  “Well then,” said the ambassador, “since you have heard of him, I marvel greatly that you have not sent him such gifts as would assure his friendship. The Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, the Sultan of Egypt, and all the rest, send gifts to him every year. They know very well that they live out their lives only at my lord’s pleasure. And if it does not please you to do this, then at least acquit him of the tribute he has to pay to the Hospitallers and the Templars, and he will be quits with you.”

  The king was infuriated by the conduct of the ambassador and by the fact that he had brought the two aides bearing the symbolic instruments of murder and death. Nevertheless, the king kept his temper. He told them he would see them in the afternoon, after he had given some thought to the matter.

  In the afternoon he met them again, and this time both the master of the Temple and the master of the Hospital were in attendance on the king, standing beside his throne. The ambassador repeated what he had said earlier in the day. The two masters were incensed. They told the ambassador that if it were not for the king’s honorable intentions in receiving them, they would be thrown into the sea outside Acre. Instead they were to be sent back to the Old Man of the Mountain, from whom they must return within fifteen days with suitable letters and jewels to be offered to the king in order to appease him. The king rejected the threats implied in the three-bladed knife and the winding sheet, and wanted something better.

  The ambassador returned within fifteen days. We hear no more about the two youths. This time he came with more suitable offerings: the Old Man’s shirt—“This has been closest to me, and therefore I present it to you,” and a gold ring of very fine workmanship bearing his name—“With this ring I espouse you, and we shall be one.” In addition there were many jewels, crystal animals and fruit, and various table games. All these presents were heavily scented with ambergris tied to them with fine gold thread. The king, in return, sent the Old Man of the Mountain a chest full of jewels, rolls of scarlet cloth, horse snaffles of silver, and cups of gold.

  In this way, the French king who was to become a saint formed an alliance with the murderous Old Man of the Mountain, whose real name was Najm ad-Din. It was a strange confrontation.

  The king was intrigued by the character of the prince of the Assassins. He sent his own interpreter, Yves le Breton, to stay at Masyaf, and to report on the beliefs and political prospects of the strange community living on top of the mountain.

  The report is lost, but Joinville was able to obtain some portions of it or he remembered what Yves le Breton told him. Joinville knew the interpreter well and had a high regard for him. He belonged to the Order of the Preaching Brothers. His task was to convert the Saracens to the Christian faith, and for this purpose he spoke Arabic. He was one of the few Christians who had any interest in Islam. Yves le Breton told Joinville one day about his encounter with an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. “What are you doing with these things?” he asked her. She answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them. “Why would you do this?” Yves asked her. She answered, “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God, who is wholly worthy and can do all manner of good to us.”

  Yves le Breton’s mission marks something new in the minds of the Crusaders: a general interest in Muslim beliefs, an effort to understand the aspirations of a people long considered simply as mortal enemies. Instead of blind hatred there was a tentative reaching out, a searching of hearts. One of the things the Crusaders were beginning to know was that Islam, far from being a monolithic religion, with orderly hierarchies, absolute doctrines, and unchanging forms, was riddled with sects. The Old Man of the Mountain, for example, belonged to an offshoot of the Shi’a sect, which had its origins in Persia. They venerated Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, more than they venerated Muhammad. Those who obeyed the law of Ali regarded those who obeyed the law of Muhammad as miscreants or heretics worthy of death. There was an unbridgeable gap between them.

  Yves le Breton went up to Masyaf and stayed there for some time. He attempted to convert the Old Man of the Mountain to the Christian faith, an attempt that was doomed to failure. Yet the Old Man remained cordial. Yves le Breton was invited into his bedroom, where there were many books, including an old Gnostic Acts of Peter which had been translated into Arabic. The Old Man said he had often read the book and delighted in it. He said, “I have a great liking for my lord St. Peter; for at the beginning of the world the soul of Abel, when he was killed, went into the body of Noah, and when Noah died it went into the body of Abraham; and from the body of Abraham, when he died, it went into the body of St. Peter at the time when God came down to earth.”

  Yves le Breton, as a true member of the Order of Preaching Brothers, had no patience with the works of the Gnostics, and said so. The Old Man of the Mountain was not offended. He remained a Shi’a Muslim who venerated Ali and delighted in St. Peter.

  One of their discussions concerned the beliefs of the Shi’a sect as understood by the Assassins. The Old Man of the Mountain said:

  Know that one of the rules of the law of Ali is that when a man is killed in the service of his lord, his soul enters a more pleasant body than it had before; and therefore the Assassins do not hesitate to get themselves killed when their lord commands because they believe they will be in more pleasant circumstances after they are dead.

  And there is another rule: they believe that no one dies except on the day appointed for him; and no one should hold this belief, for Go
d can prolong or shorten our lives. But the Bedouins support this rule of the law of Ali, and thus they refuse to put on armor when they go into battle, for otherwise they believe they would be acting against the commandment of their law. And when they curse their children, they tell them: “May you be cursed like the Franks, who put on armor for fear of death.”

  When Yves le Breton came down from the mountain, he had acquired more knowledge about the Assassins than any foreigner before him. Almost from the beginning, the Crusaders had encountered the Assassins, but never so intimately.

  Louis knew the Old Man of the Mountain was friendly to him only because the Old Man was on bad terms with the sultan of Damascus. On his side, the king’s embassy to the Old Man was part of a larger plan. Once again the Crusaders were forced to attempt to bring about a balance of power between Damascus and Cairo. The task of the Christians was continually to keep the two Muslim powers on the edge of war, in order to be certain that they would not waste their energies attacking the Christian strongholds. Fast footwork was necessary, and the king had always to give the impression that he commanded a larger army than he possessed.

  About the end of November 1252, Blanche of Castile, regent of France during the king’s absence, died in Paris. In the last year of her life she had to deal with the strange Crusade of the Shepherds, led by the half-mad Master of Hungary, a pale, bearded ascetic who acquired a following of poor shepherds and farmworkers. The Master of Hungary spoke of leading his flock to the Holy Land, but as he moved across France he seemed to be more interested in killing priests and looting than in bringing about a real Crusade. He performed sacraments in his own way, healed the sick, inveighed against the rich, argued vehemently with university students, and established himself as a dangerous popular leader with the power to lead a peasant army wherever he wished.